Normally, I'd have to work on New Year's Eve. I work overnights, don't get weekends off and I don't have the kind of job where we can hang a CLOSED sign on the door and tell people to come back later. In fact, I was scheduled to work New Year's Eve this year, and would have as I've done in many years past (my 21st anniversary on the job is January 4th).
Some of you know I started dating a woman a few months before first logging on to this website. We fell in love, and I moved into her one-bedroom apartment with her and her now-12-year-old son - her 21-year-old son lives on his own and is graduating film school soon. Using shoji screens we converted a portion of the living room into a makeshift bedroom for him - the removable walls allow him to have access to what's going on around him as well as let him watch the living room TV when his PS3 and the Internet aren't enough!
She was born in the Ukraine, and has lived here for nearly two decades - yes, her first son was born a citizen of the USSR, as was she. She didn't know English when she first moved here, and had a domineering husband with whom she wasn't really in love. She married him because she didn't think she had any other viable options. She was and still is a Jew, though she doesn't practice her faith much, probably an aftereffect of growing up in a culture where she was discriminated against for being born a Jew. Needless to say, childhood and young adulthood weren't very happy times for her.
She hit rock bottom when her husband, the family's sole provider, left her eight years ago, leaving her to raise the children. She couldn't afford legal representation, and thus got a terrible divorce settlement. She had to go from housewife to breadwinner, and didn't even know how to use a checkbook. She was intelligent - she came to the States with a degree in library science, and received a second degree after the divorce in business administration - but making a living with limited English language skills and no experience was daunting to say the least. This pushed her into a deep depression - something I'm all too familiar with myself. She spent most of her time off just lying in bed staring at the ceiling at home. If it wasn't for her parents, who had emigrated to Israel along with her sister, coming to America to help her after the divorce, she would probably have been in an even worse state.
Since the divorce, she spent a lot of time looking for someone to be with - like me, she doesn't enjoy being alone as much as she does having a partner to share her life with. However, she felt her English skills were lacking, leaving her to seek partnership in the Russian-speaking community - the same community that looked down upon her when she lived in the Ukraine. All she found were stereotypical men, interested in entertainment and a good time but with no interest in being in a committed relationship.
The nadir to this experience came last year, on New Year's Eve. She purchased a ticket to go to a party populated by other Russian speakers from the old country, despite not having anyone to go with. She figured that maybe she'd meet someone there - it was New Year's Eve, anything was possible. What she hadn't planned on was the entire group consisting of couples, either dating or married - she was the only singleton in the place. Despite this, some men actually had the nerve to hit on her, with their dates practically within earshot. It was very depressing for her, and not something she ever wanted to repeat again.
She met me by finally taking the advice of a co-worker and opening up her dating possibilities to people other than Russian immigrants by using an English-language dating website. She worried she wouldn't be able to carry on a conversation or understand what she was being told, but her desire for love overcame her fears. Still, as I'm sure some of the women in this audience can attest, online dating is daunting enough without adding a lack of confidence or experience in the local culture. Just as she was preparing to cancel her account, I found her profile and we exchanged a few messages and a phone call, which led swiftly to a first date.
She was the first woman to ever kiss me first on a date, something that she's never done before, and was shocked at how easy it was to carry on a conversation with me. While I speak not more than a few words of Russian, I do have an accent unlike most New Yorkers - it's more "accentless", like the English used by network TV reporters. I can't help it - my father got custody when he divorced my mother when I was five, and he was busy enough that I was largely left to my own devices about learning certain things. I watched a lot of television, including the news, and it was the accent that appealed to me the most, it would seem. (Though I do confess that I have a habit of emulating the accents of other people I'm speaking with from time to time - I once had a Brit asking me what part of London I was from, and had to sheepishly explain that I wasn't from anywhere near London...) Anyway, for her this meant that I was exceptionally easy to understand, more so than most "Noo Yawkers" she'd encountered up to that point.
Long story made a little less long, we fell in love, we're extremely happy together, and she's the woman I want to marry. I actually offered her a proposal on Christmas Eve, but she's still not entirely accepting the reality of it - I'm going to buy her an engagement ring later today, hopefully. I'd originally planned to do this after we'd been dating for at least a year - we met in July, I usually take vacation in south Florida in August for my birthday, and I know people down there who would be happy to handle all the necessary details to arrange an intimate little wedding on short notice. We may still do that, but I haven't discussed that with her yet - the other option, which I did raise in the recent past, was a quickie chapel wedding in Las Vegas! The Florida idea has more appeal to me, though - I'm sure Vegas is nice, but we're talking August, and I lived in south Florida for two years and still have some friends living there, including a guy I met in the fifth grade who's like a brother to me.
I'm spending New Year's Eve with her - my girlfriend and love, Anya. I originally thought that maybe she'd want to go back to that party and show me off to the other former Soviets, but she has other plans in mind - the party was very expensive and she wants nothing to do with it. We're going to a party at the home of her ex-husband's employee, a woman who befriended her even before the divorce and remained friends after. We're still debating whether we want to be there when the ball drops, or to be at home for it and then head to the party after midnight. There will be some kids there, so I'll be entertaining them with a handful of card tricks I'm planning to take with me. The kids are going to freak out when they see Pure Smoke in action. And my girlfriend can't wait to introduce me to her friend - apparently the quality of Russian men is terribly poor and I'm considered a hell of a catch by comparison! She loves to show me off every chance she gets! I certainly can't complain...
To get the night off from work, I had to do some serious schedule juggling, get the cooperation of my boss (who'd originally nixed the idea) and pay a co-worker to cover my shift nearly as much as I would have earned if I'd worked it. (I'll be covering him in the evening on New Year's Day, so I can't whoop it up too late.) But it will be worth it to erase the terrible memories of last year's party from Anya's mind and replace them with much happier ones.
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